A day for good news

So the release date for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is officially July 16th. People who know me will realize that I consider this a momentous event. I'm so addicted to these books it's not funny. I think that if I were a crack addict shaking from withdrawal, and there were two tables in front of me - a dose of the drug on the left-hand table, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on the right - I'd dive to the right without hesitation, and thereafter be so engrossed in the book that I'd completely forget about the drug, not to mention food and drink and sleep (until I finished the book of course). Since my birthday is July 11th, I'm getting a nice birthday present this year. Now to plan my reading regimen for June and July to make sure the first five are maximally fresh in my mind for that date, and investigate the possibility of getting to a midnight opening somewhere...

Another excellent piece of news is that Poland has once again stood up for the democratic process in the European Union and refused to let software patent advocates push their version of legislation through under the radar. Take that, patent pushers - once again, You Forgot Poland! (Yes, I'm the 47,948,368th person to make that joke, but it's still funny)

Finally, a bit of technical good news of interest to probably very few people, but it's been announced that generics in Whidbey will be CLS-compliant. This should make life for IKVM a little more interesting... it becomes far more necessary to have some level of generics support, but perhaps the new CLS restrictions will make the implementation easier. No information yet (that I can find) on whether MS gave any consideration to interoperability with Java generics - I strongly suspect that they didn't. Jeroen may need to pull off another miracle to get the mapping right. I have no doubt he's up to the task.